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gwern comments on I'm starting a game company and looking for a co-founder. - Less Wrong
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Is anything known about the success rate of people who mostly design games which fascinate them vs. the success rate of people who mostly follow what's known about the gaming market? How about success magnitude?
I'd personally like to know more about the reasoning behind
If you look at the top iOS games, there are many remakes of the same ideas, that nevertheless continue to be very profitable. This shows that the business part of those ideas is solid. I think tweaking those games slightly, going outside of the saturated themes (city/farm games), while adding core elements from other popular games is guaranteed to result in success.
You're not going to be building a cow clicker, are you? :(
My stance is: "If a slot machine game gives the most ROI, then I'll make slot machine games."
So, if a cow clicker gives the most ROI, then I'll build a cow clicker. :)
Given how little money the average gamer spends, it seems to me that earning N dollars from FarmVille might even create more disutility overall (in the form of wasted time) than obtaining the same N dollars by robbing somebody. If that's true, then LW readers who adopt your strategy but start with a different background (e.g. combat instead of game-making) should start robbing people and donating the proceeds to SingInst.
ETA: on further thought, disregard this comment, it's wrong. If you completely ignore the cost to society, then saving the world by robbery still requires an opportunity to make lots of money from robbery. Otherwise getting a high-paying job seems more cost-effective, and starting a startup even better than that. I'm sorry. Continue doing what you're doing :-)
So this is why Eliezer is always priming his readers with "rationality as martial arts"! :D
Beware the X-Rational Ninja -- he will extrapolate your volition and steal your money! Then he will give you two boxes and you can choose to take one or two of them. If you choose one box, it contains all your stolen money and an authographed edition of HP:MoR; but if you choose two boxes, the first one is empty. (The second box always contains a yearly free subscription to a Rationalist Cow Clicker, where you can click on cows representing your cognitive biases.)
Is making games the right industry for you?
I don't know for certain, but this is where my strengths lie, and this is where I have experience and connections. If the right opportunity presented itself, I would gladly start another company that promised to be as profitable.
However, this will not be the only company I start, and starting a company in the same field (i.e. games) will increase my chances of success. If I start a company in another field, I'd have to stick to that field to keep this kind of advantage.
It sounds that your goal is to make money to donate to efficient causes, like existential risk prevention. If that is so, I suspect that you aren't being strategic about it, because it doesn't seem like you explored enough other startup options aside from games.
What is the expected value of you exploring other options? I suspect that it's greater than you working on games now, but that the returns diminish somewhat quickly. Here are some ideas that I thought of if you're interested: https://medium.com/on-startups/6ecc143afe65.
Note that Alexei (the author of this post) later wrote this post.
I just read it, and I think my point still stands. To be more concrete, here's what I would, and did, do: spend some time coming up with startup ideas (following Paul Graham's advice), after some time, look through them all, come up with their expected values, and choose.
I think that there are a lot of ideas that Alexei has the technical skills to build, and the insightfulness to discover. And I think that a lot of these ideas are orders of magnitude more profitable than the game startup. At the very least, I think that the chances of these two above statements being true are high enough where it's worth thinking hard about, instead of saying "I'm good at game development.... I'll do game development."
Then shouldn't you look for a co-founder who salivates at the idea of luring a massive population of weak-willed casual gamers into Skinner boxes that make them send a constant cash stream at your company, not people who like playing games and want to make games they themselves find compelling?
-- Tim Rogers, Who Killed Videogames
I would pay one hundred dollars a month for a game that "compulsion traps" me into doing what I'm supposed to be doing in the manner described in that article.
Who said I was looking for those types of people?
*Edit: thanks for the link. I've seen and read that page multiple times, but I only now realized it's actually a multi-page story. And it's good. And Tim Rogers' other writings are good. It's certainly showing things in a new light. Very thought provoking...
ha, my users demand that sorta features from me (achievements). You can crowdsource that kind of stuff if you have good filter.
Heh. As long as you know you're being evil by doing it, I won't mind. ;)
It's for a good cause, so it's okay, right?
There are remakes, yes, but how do you generalize from that to 'very profitable'? If remakes are cheap to make, then any obviousness of success would incentivize still more clones and cannibalize profits. If remakes are makable even by the less-competent, doubly so.
Google top 10 PC games. It's almost all lists like this. Now look at how many sequels there are.
Here is a list of best-selling PC games. Notice that almost half of the top 10 are sequels.
Note that I'm not saying making a sequel is very profitable. I'm saying if you have a very profitable game, then making a sequel of it is very profitable and safe.
Oh. OK, that makes sense.
Incidentally, video games usually manage to avoid the problems that movie sequels have; movie sequels are usually not as good as the original, but video game sequels usually manage to improve on their predecessors.
But there are also a lot of games that are very similar to the top selling games, but never become famous precisely because they are too similar to previously existing games.
Right. What I'm saying is: keep the business part (for example the way the game monetizes the players), but change the theme and improve the gameplay. I would have to go into specific examples of how that could be done, but that's not really what this post is for.